Recovering the Past

WITH BUT FEW EXCEPTIONS, people do not enjoy being enslaved, or, to quote Jefferson, "reduced under tyranny". During the 246 years of slavery in these United States, the notion that kidnapping people in Africa, chaining them below decks, and selling them into bondage across the ocean was beneficial to them was widely propagated, the reasoning being that the enslaved were being liberated from savagery, given the benefits of Christianity, fed, clothed, housed, and provided gainful employment with meaningful labor. The Bible, which justifies slavery in no fewer than two hundred scriptural God given passages, afforded the plantation owners cover. In fact, the slaves in America were almost constantly in revolt, and Thomas Jefferson, among many other slave owners, feared a general uprising. On several occasions, most notably in 1831 led by Nat Turner, their fears materialized. From the end of the Civil War through the nineteen sixties, with reverberations today, the treatment of African-Americans, who, it can be argued were never really freed, has inspired countless acts of rebellion. Noteworthy are the Atlanta riot of 1907 and the Tulsa municipal civil war of 1921, about which much has been written, but only recently. Invariably these violent events were precipitated by a young black man looking at a young white woman, and were ignored in history, or revised to become unprovoked riots whose blame belonged exclusively to the black community. In Wilmington, North Carolina, the situation was different. There, in 1898, the majority population was African-American, and African-Americans were a majority in the city government, holing most of the elective offices, and were prominent in the business and social community. Until the great coup of 1898, detailed thoroughly by journalist-historian David Zucchino, in his seminal new monograph "Wilimington's Lie". It was a premeditated, overtly racist plot to steal the city from all African-american influence, and put it in the hands of white supremacists. Before 1898 fifty six percent of Wilmington's population was black; today, sixteen percent is. We repeat the mistakes of teh past when we fail to learn history, and we fail to learn history when a white supremacist culture conceals it, white washes it, and refuses to impart it to future generations. Thanks to scholars like Zucchino, it is becoming a bit more difficult to do so.